A tale of corruption and murder in HAMBURG
Dark novel set in VENICE at the turn of the 20th Century
22nd December 2025
Venetian Vespers by John Banville, a dark novel set in Venice at the turn of the 20th Century.
I always love a book by John Banville, there is something about his writing that lulls his reader into the darker recesses of people’s lives; his stories are written with authority and great panache.
Venice is very much a character in its own right, as newlyweds Evelyn Dolmann and his wife Laura set off by train right at the end of 1899 to the watery city of Venice. They are due to live in the grand, chilly and crumbling Palazzo Dioscuri. Theirs is a marriage that is not made in heaven. Evelyn is deferential to his wife and she seems to have no interest in the more intimate side of their relationship. She comes from an enormously wealthy American family, but for some unfathomable reason the wealth due to her has been withheld and has gone instead to her sister, who stiffly sees the pair off in London.
They are heading to a city that is “...unlike anywhere 
else, unique to the point of uncanniness, and subject to sea-mists and winter fogs and all manner of exotic and potentially debilitating miasmas.”
On the first evening, Evelyn needs to get some air after a forced sexual encounter with his wife, that has naturally left him dazed and out of sorts. In a drinking establishment off St Mark’s Square, he happens upon a man who firmly suggests he was only a couple of years below him at his boarding school. Evelyn has no recollection of him but doesn’t admit this. He is there with his sister, Cesca, to whom Evelyn is immediately drawn, with an intensity that he has never really experienced before. He allows himself to be plied with grappa and finally falls into bed at some unearthly hour. When he awakens, he discovers that Laura has disappeared and assumes she has gone out to explore the city, but as the day becomes night she still hasn’t returned. By then he has been inveigled into inviting the siblings to stay, as they are about to be made homeless.
And thus the scene is set for a game of subterfuge, venality, and gaslighting, as the setting closes in on the characters and the city creeps into the very bones of the story and the characters. A wonderfully, carefully paced novel that will appeal to fans of Patricia Highsmith.
[note: there is an issue detailed in the story that may be triggering for some]
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